Making a communal life in the North is as gradual a business as retooling politics. When a crane hoisted a steel spire into place last month on top of St Anne's Cathedral in the middle of Belfast, many citizens failed to notice writes Fionnuala O Connor
Dean Houston McKelvey calls it a "Spire of Hope" for a better future, and indeed the silver needle has few competitors as modern sky-furniture. But it was relegated in its first weeks by the installation of Stormont's gleaming political edifice.
Likewise the fortnight-long Cathedral Quarter festival, just finished, perhaps did not bring in as many as the varied events deserved. Rechristening a knot of streets fails to entice the wary and makes some old hands wrinkle their noses.
There are several reasons to overlook the bit of the city where the cathedral stands. The big grey pile has its charms, not least the fact that it is still unfinished a century after opening, but its stance a little way back from Lower Donegall Street is expressive enough.
St Anne's gives its name to one of the city's most deprived electoral wards: the bulk of the ward is the Shankill, the cathedral congregation widely dispersed. Pews fill only for grand occasions, VIP funerals, royal visits, Christmas concerts.
This is where Troubles-battered north Belfast touches a "centre" that through the last century, unlike Dublin, has had only a clutch of houses, few tenants of upper storeys.
By day life buzzes around the sprinkling of restaurants and enterprises daring enough to start up in once neglected alleyways. After office hours nightlife, traffic dwindles.
For more than a year now Belfast City Council has been trying to increase "footfalls" by boosting an "evening economy", coaxing shops to stay open until 7pm, and pubs and restaurants to offer early-evening discounts.
It works better around the City Hall than around the cathedral, where not a single big store exists. But bars there are, pubs as venerable as the Duke of York where the teenage Gerry Adams worked before republicanism took him over, and a slew of restored or new ventures: cue festivals with thin pretext or none.
So far shopping has been pitched as the major attraction for visitors, which leaves many cold. The commercial centre of a largely poor city traumatised by political violence and centuries of sectarian strife is marketed now, like so many other places, as a place for a glossy weekend, the setting for aspirational accommodation. Mundane bed and breakfast, when all is said and done, but presented as an exercise in cool living. In Belfast, the joins show even more than elsewhere.
Temple Bar repels many Dubliners and perhaps more non-Dubliners, but it has only glitzified an already fairly busy cluster of nightlife.
In Belfast, the veneer over damage and pain is very thin, and very new. It is also true that many urban streets have livelier pasts than seem possible to those who only know them in decline.
Cities, like language, have to change or die. The new commercial centre of Royal Avenue, built to replace the old shambles and butchers of mainly Catholic Hercules Street, peters out well short of the cathedral.
Some businesses and communal concerns near St Anne's worry that the new has no place for them, with second-hand bookshops already driven out by higher rents while a campaign for subsidised rents struggled to get going.
A piece of faded graffiti on a bricked-up space still hopes for the conviction of "the arsonists" who destroyed the old arcade behind the bricks. The arcade's small traders are scattered.
Others blossom: the pub bearing the name of poet John Hewitt; the nearby Campaign for the Administration of Justice, battling in post-conflict times against injustice to immigrants while refusing to give up on unsolved cases.
Down the street a little way is a derelict former bank that some would love to see reborn as a theatre. Once the top floor was the dignified "Assembly Rooms" of a very small city indeed. In 1798, it was the courtroom in which the United Irelander Henry Joy McCracken was sentenced to death.
From there his devoted sister Mary-Anne rushed to one important citizen after another to plead for his life.
Their parents, woven into Belfast's dominant class of merchants, lived yards away in Rosemary Street. Henry Joy went to the gallows before the day was out at the nearby corner of High Street and Cornmarket.
The old Assembly Rooms look across the street at the building that used to house a stately newspaper, the Northern Whig, now a stately pub. Another former bank has set up a few hundred yards away as the most luxurious city hotel to date, taxis squeezing past each other in narrow old Waring Street.
Only multiplied "footfalls" will regenerate night-time Belfast. It needs time to heal. Recreating a lively city after dark was never going to be easy.